Sex, Sales and Social Media
Is it only horny college students on Facebook? Or 40-something business people on LinkedIn? According to Google ad planner data, it’s not. But let’s look deeper look at the numbers.
Key Stats:
- MySpace seem to have larger proportions of young people.
- Facebook has the most balanced proportions.
- LinkedIn has a little older group
Key Stats:
- Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Ning have over 20% more females than males
- Reddit and Digg have more male members than female.
Key Stats:
- LinkedIn has the highest education membership
- Facebook has the greatest dispersed members
- MySpace, due to younger members, is less likely to have those with post-secondary education
Key Stats:
- LinkedIn contains more members in the highest income bracket
- StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit have more members in the lower pay bracket
- Facebook has a blend of both.
Just as traditional marketers would research which television stations and newspapers have audiences that match their target demographics, so should online marketers determine which websites, search-engine keywords, and social-media networks would deliver the greatest number of relevant leads at the lowest-possible cost in both time and money.
Taking the time to identify your target market, including breaking it down into appropriate segments, and then utilizing this information in your online marketing activities will save you a significant amount of time and money — and will bring much better results for your business. This is just the first step of a full marketing plan, but it is the most important and doing this alone will put you on the right track whether you are using SEO, Social Media, Pay-Per-Click, Email Marketing or any combination of these.
At the risk of repeating the old university textbooks, here are a few demographic considerations that also affect online-marketing decisions:
- Which leads are most profitable? Should you continue to target them, or is there another potential group that your company has not tried to reach? Are they men or women, teenage girls or middle-aged men, residents of Toronto or New York? How much do they earn? What is their typical level of education? And so on. Using reports and stats (such as the ones above) to target these prospects where they spend their time online.
- Combine traditional-marketing research with online analytics. Standard demographic profiles are easily available for marketing professionals, but platforms like Google Analytics add even more data. The traditional methods identify who is likely buying -- or would buy -- your product or service and therefore whom should be targeted. Website-traffic analyses describe how those people are finding (or would find) your website.
- The key is to combine the two factors. Say that your business website sells European vacations. Sales and marketing research may tell that most purchasers are (or would be) college girls. Online-metric research may reveal that people are finding (or would find) the website through social media generally and Facebook specifically. So, as a result, one important online-marketing tactic would be to target college students, specifically girls, in their senior year on Facebook through methods including a business page, sponsored advertisements, and a business group on the website. If you would try to reach the same audience on LinkedIn, I doubt that you would receive many leads from college students there.
Over the years marketing has learned to move away from mass audience towards segmented marketing. This first started with the arrival of niche newspapers, magazines, and cable channels that cater towards a specific portion of the population. The Internet has only greatly accelerated this trend. Thus, the traditional principle of marketing segmentation also needs to be applied to social media. For example, Twitter -- the other major social-media network in addition to Facebook -- is not really one large community but rather a massive collection of individual ones. One lesson that I think many new, and old marketers, forget is that one day of research can save a month of work and deliver much greater results.